Is your Customer Experience generating profitability or draining it from you?

Every business is delivering a customer experience the question is- how good is it? what is it doing for your business?, how is it making your customers feel? and is it contributing to your business growth through increased customer loyalty and word of mouth referrals or is it adding cost through increased marketing and recruitment costs as a result of customer and staff turnover and damaging negative word of mouth?.

The difference between a consistently great customer experience strategy and a poor one is huge when you look at not only outcomes but all the other advantages a totally focused culture brings to an organisation long term. Including greater engagement across your entire team, increased loyalty both from within and from your customers, your ability to capitalise on the creativity of your team, less costly customer complaints and negative word of mouth, a reduction in costs and an ability to attract more of the right people.

So, if you are delivering a customer experience now, everyday with every customer. Why wouldn’t you spend a little more time and develop an experience that is actually going to grow your business and its profitability.

An increasing number of businesses are starting to understand the power of a customer experience strategy. This includes the importance of customer emotions, a greater understanding of customer expectations and the fact that there are other ways of adding value besides reducing prices and margins.

Let’s not get too emotional. Yes, it is about your people and your customers and the experiences you consistently deliver to both, but this is business and business is about making money and being successful long-term

This means that any investment in a customer experience strategy must be just that, an investment that produces a measurable financial return.

We know a loyal customer can increase value to a business in a number of ways including-

• Repeat Value = the additional revenue that results from a customer choosing to do business with you over time

• Incremental value = the additional revenue that results from a customer spending more per transaction.

• Advocacy value = the additional value that results from a customer influencing others to buy from you.

Business has a choice and that choice is to continue to compete in a world of sameness where price seemed to be the only strategy that a business can come up to compete or develop a strategy that will see your business establish a true and sustainable competitive advantage a competitive advantage that will be totally customer focused, have total commitment and engagement from your people and will have a long-term and continual development focus.

Suggestion –

• Calculate the value of a customers loyalty

• Calculate the value of increased positive word of mouth

• Calculate the value of low staff turnover

• Calculate the value of high employee engagement

• Calculate the value of a focus that’s not on price

• Calculate the value of capitalising on your teams ideas

• Calculate the value of a sustainable competitive advantage

Now let’s see if you have the budget to invest in the development of a Customer Experience improvement strategy.